If there is one thing I can say that Metroid Prime has in spades, it's atmosphere. The music, sounds, and environment design do remind me of other sci-fi shooters of the time, such as Halo or Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. The metroidvania formula was adapted sufficiently to a 3D FPS, but not without some caveats.
First off, far be it from me to complain about backtracking in a Metroid game, but it gets a bit tedious in the back half here. Samus doesn't feel even half as quick as she does in the 2D titles, and the later game power-ups do not do enough to make up for that. Lots of little animations (switching beam types, morph ball transformations, etc.) just feel slightly too long as well. I liked the scanning feature in theory, but again it always felt a little bit too long and ultimately came at the cost of shoving the overall plot of the game into text logs.
All that being said, the ability to freely switch between each beam type was a cool idea and each one maintained relevancy throughout. The level design is as impeccable as always with each area being interconnected in (usually) convenient ways once you've got the necessary abilities. There's good enemy variety, and a couple of cool bosses too.
Having only played Prime 3 (and mostly forgotten it since), Prime didn't quite blow me away as much as I was hoping. It's solid, and I still want to finally play 2 when Nintendo finally decides to port it; just wish everything was a little bit quicker.
First off, far be it from me to complain about backtracking in a Metroid game, but it gets a bit tedious in the back half here. Samus doesn't feel even half as quick as she does in the 2D titles, and the later game power-ups do not do enough to make up for that. Lots of little animations (switching beam types, morph ball transformations, etc.) just feel slightly too long as well. I liked the scanning feature in theory, but again it always felt a little bit too long and ultimately came at the cost of shoving the overall plot of the game into text logs.
All that being said, the ability to freely switch between each beam type was a cool idea and each one maintained relevancy throughout. The level design is as impeccable as always with each area being interconnected in (usually) convenient ways once you've got the necessary abilities. There's good enemy variety, and a couple of cool bosses too.
Having only played Prime 3 (and mostly forgotten it since), Prime didn't quite blow me away as much as I was hoping. It's solid, and I still want to finally play 2 when Nintendo finally decides to port it; just wish everything was a little bit quicker.